New Delhi: Even before they can speak, infants appear to develop expectations about how caregivers should respond to a crying baby, a new study shows. It found that infants between the ages of six and 12 months generally expect a caregiver to stop what they were doing and comfort a crying baby.
The study, led by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was published in ‘Developmental Psychology’. It, however, highlights that infants whose mothers reported higher levels of depressive symptoms were less likely to show this expectation.
The findings are based on observations of 113 infants who participated at one or more time points at six, nine and 12 months of age. The researchers examined whether infants were surprised when a caregiver ignored a crying baby rather than comforting it, and whether the nature of the response was associated with maternal depressive symptoms.
“Even before infants can speak, they hold expectations about positive caregiving experiences,” Kexin Hu, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in a university statement.
Comfort vs ignore
To test these expectations, researchers first familiarised infants with videos showing a woman performing household chores. They were then shown two different scenarios.
In one, called the “comfort event”, the woman stopped her household work and comforted a crying baby. In the other, called the “ignore event”, she continued with her chores and did not respond to the crying baby.
Researchers measured how long the infants looked at each video. The experiment used a “violation-of-expectation” method, a commonly used approach in infant cognition research. In this method, a longer look is interpreted as an indication that an event is unexpected or surprising to the infant.
Across all ages tested, infants looked longer at the ignore event than at the comfort event. This suggested that, on average, they expected the caregiver to respond to the crying baby.
“If they look longer at the unexpected event, it suggests they are trying to figure out what is happening,” Nancy McElwain, co-author and research professor in the same department, said. “In the same way infants show surprise when an object defies a law of physics — such as floating in the air or moving through solid surfaces — they expect a caregiver not to ignore a crying baby.”
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Depressive symptoms in mothers
The researchers also collected information from mothers about their depressive symptoms. At each of the three time points, higher maternal depressive symptoms were associated with weaker infant expectations that a caregiver would comfort a crying baby.
The researchers said the association did not significantly differ between the three ages tested — six, nine and 12 months.
One possibility is that infants whose mothers experience more depressive symptoms may, on average, experience less sensitive caregiving, which could influence their expectations about how caregivers behave.
Another possibility is that infants of mothers with higher depressive symptoms may have greater difficulty regulating themselves in unfamiliar environments such as a laboratory. This could affect their ability to process the videos and demonstrate their expectations during the experiment.
The researchers said further work is needed to determine which mechanisms, if any, explain the association that the study has.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)